303 p. : 25 cm

Originally published: Florenz und Bagdad : eine westostliche Geschichte des Blicks. Munchen : Verlag C.H. Beck oHG, 2008

Includes bibliographical references and index

Introduction : Describing a culture : Blickwechsel (shifting focus / exchanging glances) -- 1. Perspective as a question of images : paths between East and West. What is a symbolic form? ; Arab mathematics and Western art ; Geometry and decorative art : the arabesque ; the globalization of perspective ; Blickwechsel : Orhan Pamuk and perspective as a "betrayal" -- 2. The taming of the eye : criticism of seeing in Islam. Religion and the prohibition of images ; Images as a betrayal of the living creation ; The Koran as scripture and script ; Under the gaze of Allah : pictures as narrative ; Blickwechsel : Pictures with a living gaze -- 3. Alhazen's measurement of light and the Arab invention of the camera obscura. Alhazen's book of optics, the Perspectiva ; Distance from ancient visual culture ; Pathways of light and propeties of objects ; Mathematics and geometry in Islamic art ; Blickwechsel : Kepler rediscovers the camera obscura -- 4. Perception and knowledge : a theory of vision becomes a theory of pictures. Scholasticism and the conflict over perception and epistemology ; Before perspective : the gaze in Giotto's painting ; Pelacani's invention of mathematical space ; Ghiberti's commentaries and Piero's mathematical art ; Blickwechsel : Alhazen or Euclid? the option for Vitruvius -- 5. Brunelleschi measures the gaze : mathematical perspective and theater. Two inventors in Florence ; Physical space : the architecture of the gaze ; "Prospects" on the stage ; Panoramas in Urbino ; Blickwechsel : The geometry of the muqarnas -- 6. The subject in the picture : perspective as a symbolic form. Stealing an emblem : the eye as representative of the gaze ; Nicholas of Cusa and the sovereignty of God's gaze ; The subject as new Narcissus ; The horizon and the view through a window ; Blickwechsel : The mashrabiyya as a symbolic form -- Conclusion : Comparing the gaze in different cultures

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